Businesses worldwide recognize the commercial value of their data and seek reliable, cost-effective ways to protect the information stored on their computer networks while minimizing impact on productivity. Protecting information is often part of a routine process that is performed within an organization. A company might back up critical computing systems such as databases, file servers, web servers, and so on as part of a daily, weekly, or monthly maintenance schedule. The company may similarly protect computing systems used by each of its employees, such as those used by an accounting department, marketing department, engineering department, and so forth.
Given the rapidly expanding volume of data under management, companies also continue to seek innovative techniques for managing data growth, in addition to protecting data. For instance, companies often implement migration techniques for moving data to lower cost storage over time and data reduction techniques for reducing redundant data, pruning lower priority data, etc. Enterprises also increasingly view their stored data as a valuable asset. Along these lines, customers are looking for solutions that not only protect and manage, but also leverage their data. For instance, solutions providing data analysis capabilities, information management, improved data presentation and access features, and the like, are in increasing demand.
For many users, maintaining the security of electronic data is an ever-increasing concern and is growing ever more expensive. Preventing the leakage of data is of particular importance to enterprise users who often have access to private customer data, including financial information (e.g., social security numbers, credit card data, etc.). The challenges related to maintaining data security has continued to increase as more and more enterprise users utilize mobile devices to store and/or access data within an enterprise environment, and outside of the enterprise environment.
Today, to help protect data and to increase the accessibility of the data both throughout the enterprise environment and outside of the enterprise environment, many users and organizations store data on secondary storage devices or on a device in a network (e.g., cloud storage devices). In many cases, the data is encrypted on the secondary storage device. Although data is more secure when stored in an encrypted form on the secondary storage device, securing the data on the secondary storage device does not prevent malicious users from accessing sensitive data on a primary storage device (e.g., a client computing device).